Democratic politics does not work if you just talk and never shut up and listen.
Photograph: Joshua Lott/Getty Images

I’m not #FeelingTheBern anymore. I’m on Bernie Sanders’ side policy-wise. I agree with many more of his positions than I do Hillary Clinton’s. I donated money to his campaign last year and I intend to vote for him in the Ohio primary in March. Still, the “Berniebro” phenomenon has left me feeling, well, Berned-out.

I am referring to a certain demographic of Sanders supporter – white and male – who accuses anyone who’s not #FeelingTheBern of being a member of the “Establishment.”

It’s gotten bad enough that Bernie Sanders’ campaign rapid response director had to speak up about it on Twitter. It’s gotten bad enough that, among my circle of friends (who are mostly millennials about evenly split between supporting Clinton and Sanders in the primary), the “Berniebro” phenomenon immediately comes up whenever the election comes up.

The worst trait of fundamentalists is their insistence that anyone who’s not on board with their revolution is part of a coordinated conspiracy to silence and suppress that revolution. You can watch in real time as any progressive public figure who refuses to openly endorse Sanders – whether or not they also endorse Clinton – gets bombarded by wave after wave of accusations of being on the take.

If people find it off-putting or troubling that Sanders seems persistently unwilling to pivot away from his one-plank platform of attacking income inequality to talk about any other issue – be it police violence against black Americans or violence by Daesh overseas – they’re No True Leftists, because it’s self-evident to any true leftist that all issues should come back to economics.

The worst part is that I don’t think it is entirely confined to jerks on the internet – it’s been percolating its way up through the campaign, and has now even tinged the rhetoric of the candidate himself.

But when you’re fighting a “political revolution” and the entire atmosphere of your campaign is dripping with revolutionary zeal, then pretty quickly anyone who’s not with you is against you. It’s disappointing that Planned Parenthood’s choice to endorse Clinton over Sanders was a reason for Sanders to dismiss Planned Parenthood as yet another adversary to “take on”.

What I’ve liked about Sanders as a person and a candidate so far has been that he’s better than his fans. In his time in the Senate he has done the hard work of making things happen within the existing system rather than piously opining on how the system is corrupt. He also started this campaign with a no-mudslinging pledge and the intention of improving the Democratic party rather than merely proving himself separate from and superior to it.

I like the Bernie Sanders who, after his tiff with #BlackLivesMatter, went and listened to their concerns, listened to Sandra Bland’s family and #SaidHerName. I don’t like the version of him that reared his head when they first confronted him at Netroots Nation and in Seattle, storming out as though he’d been wronged.

Many of Sanders’ supporters are young, impatient college graduates who love to see someone with a clear-cut set of beliefs running roughshod over the triangulating phonies.

But if you’re one of the people being run roughshod over, and you feel you have legitimate concerns that don’t fit into that ideological model of progressivism, the revolution is a lot less appealing.

Democratic politics does not work if you just talk and never shut up and listen. And right now the Sanders campaign isn’t doing that great a job at listening.